Text the San Francisco Symphony!

On July 19, the audience chose the program in San Francisco. In an effort to reach out to younger audiences, the San Francisco Symphony gave listeners a choice (via text message) of several pieces for inclusion in their free concert at Dolores Park.

The Symphony played Sousa's The Stars and Stripes Forever, excerpts from Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, Romeo and Juliet Fantasy-Overture and Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 in C minor, and the audience could text their choice for the final piece. Options included Eine kleine Nachtmusik by Mozart, Overture to William Tell by Rossini or Hungarian Dance No. 5 in G Minor by Brahms.

Another great example of audience engagement!

Read the article here: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/techchron/detail?entry_id=43787

Online Marketing Effectiveness from eMarketer

How can an organization utilize online marketing channels to accomplish its goals?

MOST EFFECTIVE IN GENERATING ONLINE CONVERSATIONS:
1. Search engine optimization
2. Email & enewsletter**
3. Pay-per-click search ads**
4. Behavioral targeting
5. Site or page sponsorship
**respondents working with $1+ marketing budgets swapped these two in order of effectiveness


MOST EFFECTIVE IN AFFECTING BRAND PERCEPTION:
1. Site or page sponsorship
2. Search engine optimization
3. Email & enewsletter
4. Pay-per-impression ads on digital publications
5. Viral marketing



Visit eMarketer for more on this poll.

Twitter = Traffic, a TechCrunch Statistical Breakdown

The main point of this post on TechCrunch is the following – the most common ways people use Twitter are:
1. As a social information filter
2. As a link distributor

TechCrunch has come to this conclusion through first-hand experience - during the last few months, outside traffic to the site from Twitter has grown so much that Twitter is now second only to Google.

Top Sources of Traffic To TechCrunch
1. Google: 32.7%
2. Direct: 22.7%
3. Twitter: 9.7%
4. Digg: 7.4%
5. Techmeme: 2.4%
6. Other: 25.1%

Much of this traffic is generated by TechCrunch's Twitter account, with over 700,000 followers. TechCrunch uses this account to send out story links, driving followers to its site. These tweets spread virally, as followers retweet (forward) the link to others. The main take-away from this post on TechCrunch is this = "Twitter is not just about micro-media. The most powerful Tweets are those which point elsewhere."

While TechCrunch is a unique site, with a demographic that is not representative of the public, there are clearly other opportunities in that statement. As an Arts Administration student, I can see how arts organizations (or sports, any ticketed event) could utilize Twitter to make sure no seats go unsold to any event. As Twitter provides real-time feedback, using Tiny URLs to send out waves of ticketing in tiered prices could allow for an instant gauge of demand and supply, in a perishable environment where the product has a limtited shelf-life.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/14/for-techcrunch-twitter-traffic-a-statistical-breakdown/

Fox's Cartoon Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing for the next Family Guy? That's right! Fox (the network that produces The Simpsons, Family Guy, and King of the Hill) is crowdsourcing through Aniboom to find the next great cartoon hit.

Submissions are accepted from May 27-August 31; users must create a 2-4 minute animated holiday short on Aniboom, a virtual animation studio with a mission as follows, "to cultivate animated content by leveraging the web, providing online animation opportunities such as animated competitions and free online animation software".

Click here to visit Aniboom and browse through other competition entries.

Beginning September, online viewers will get to vote on the submissions, with their choice representing one of the final five spots (I assume the other four spots will be filled by a jury assembled by Fox). Finalists then will be announced around the beginning of November, and will receive $5K each. The winner will receive an additional $10K and a development deal with Fox. It will be interesting to see the results of this competition and whether it generates media attention and/or a hit.

Click here to read an article on this topic by Erick Schonfeld on TechCrunch.

A Million Penguins

On the website for A Million Penguins, Penguin publishing asks the question many ask today, "Is the same [wisdom of crowds] true in artistic fields?" Obviously, collaboration already commonly exists in artistic fields - film and television writers work in teams, theatrical projects are almost always assembled by a team of artists, and even those works that are seemingly individual (Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons) are actually the end product of a team. But can you crowdsource for content? Can a collective (as assembled a la Web 2.0 - a large group of people, geographically dispersed, without knowledge of one another) produce a work of art?

Penguin Books writes, "So is the novel immune from being swept up into the fashion for collaborative activity? Well, this is what we are going to try and discover with A Million Penguins, a collaborative, wiki-based creative writing exercise. We should go into this with the best spirit of scientific endeavour - the experiment is going live, the lab is under construction, the subjects are out there. And the results? We’ll see in a couple of months."

Fast forward (the project launched February 2007 and closed about a month later) - What's the answer? Can a novel be written by a crowd? Although Penguin doesn't release a definitive Yes or No, I think it's safe to say A Million Penguins is not an easy read. Here are the stats:

• 1030 pages of text in total
• 75,000 people visited the site during the free editing period, with 280,000 page views
  
• 1,500 people contributed to the novel, editing the wiki 11,000 times

So what does this mean? As Jeremy Ettinghausen, Digital Publisher for Penguin, blogs, "As the project evolved I think I stopped thinking about it as a literary experiment and started thinking about it more as a social experiment."

And in April 2008, the Institute of Creative Technologies of De Montfort University published A Million Penguins Research Report:

What today appears not to be a novel as we know it may in time come to be seen as one, just as work once judged not to be poetry is often later brought into the critical fold. But for the moment at least the answer to whether or not a community can write a novel appears to be 'not like this'. Our research has shown that "A Million Penguins" is something other than a novel and, thereby, opened up new questions and avenues for exploration. It has treated the final product not as a variation of a printed novel or something which could be turned into one, but as type of performance. The contributors did not form a community, rather they spontaneously organised themselves into a diverse, riotous assembly. We have demonstrated that the wiki novel experiment was the wrong way to try to answer the question of whether a community could write a novel, but as an adventure in exploring new forms of publishing, authoring and collaboration it was, ground-breaking and exciting.

Maybe crowdsourcing for traditional artistic categories in this manner doesn't necessarily work under our current definitions of the end product? Maybe this concept opens up new avenues for new categories, or work that can't be categorized? I think one definitive statement that can be made regarding A Million Penguins is this - there are a lot of people out there, looking for channels in which to express their creativity and point of view. And there must be opportunity in that!

Aaron Koblin's Sheep Market

Amazon's Mechanical Turk is a crowdsourcing marketplace - people who need something done can go there and pay those who are willing to do it. The vast majority of work available is for small tasks (labeled HIT: Human Intelligence Task) - such as transcription or simple market research like counting certain words as they appear in website comment sections. Payment can be $0.05 a word transcribed, or similar compensation. Critics call it an virtual sweatshop, as much of the work is repetitive and the pay is quite low.

San Francisco-based artist Aaron Koblin decided to use Mechanical Turk to harness the power of the crowd's creativity instead. He created the following HIT: in exchange for $0.02, users are to ‘draw a sheep facing to the left’. Koblin received 10,000 sheeps which he then combined into one art piece, The Sheep Market. Inspired by the Mechanical Turk system, and drawing on the last Industrial Revolution and the artistic response it illicited, Koblin created a custom drawing tool that captured not only the finished sheep drawing but the process. The Sheep Market is a website, that looks like a bar code initially but once the viewer zooms in s/he can make out the individual sheep caricatures. The viewer can click on a sheep, and above the collective picture a window displays the drawing process. Click here to view The Sheep Market.

Video Interview: Aaron Koblin for Wired.com